Design Philosophy

I'm trying to design easy to understand forms under the following conditions and am looking for suggestions as the best way to present the screens.

I want to be able to enter/update/query a base table "C" which is the intersection of two other tables "A" and "B". Table "C" may or may not have any locally created columns. In other words, the table may just consist of foreign keys.

One approach is for the form to have three base blocks A,B then C. A user would do a query on A followed by a query on B and then commit in C.

A second approach would be to have just a single block C with LOV for A and B.

In the first case there is a lot of screen navigation needed and a query can only be in the context of A and B, so block C is not really useful for queries.

In the second case if A and B are large using LOV is not efficient. Either the queries will be slow and the lists too long or if a restricted query is done in the LOV it means added user steps.

Any thoughts on how to deal with this type of design appreciated.

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Robert Feinman                 |    rdf_at_wren.admin.ccny.cuny.edu
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